In the phenomenon known as "spirit photography," which rose to prominence in the 19th century, ghosts are said to be captured on film by unsuspecting cameramen during the course of a normal day’s shooting. Some of them are clearly the result of double exposure or trickery—the photographer William H. Mumler built a career on such forgeries—but the most effective ones have an eerie realism, as if you’re catching a momentary glimpse into another, darker world that exists just below the surface of our own.
That’s more or less the effect of listening to Hide Before Dinner, the debut LP from the Australian group F ingers. That’s largely because each of its seven songs strictly adhere to their own cadaverous aesthetic: spider-web guitars billow and glisten, cheap synths drip like melting icicles, and Carla dal Forno—who, like F ingers’ Tarquin Manek, is also a member of the gloomy electronic outfit Tarcar—sings as if she’s in a death trance, emotionless and distant.
That kind of deliberate spookiness in clumsier hands can feel affected or, worse, just dull, but Hide Before Dinner is instead distinctly chilling, mostly because del Forno, Manek, and Samuel Karmel seem to be following specific, supernatural sheet music. Opener "Escape Into the Bushes" starts like something from the Cure’s Faith, with a mournful, two-chord guitar pattern ringing out in pitch-black open air. But the minute del Forno enters, it becomes something else. The words she’s singing are indistinct, but that hardly matters: she sings them like they’re the familiar intro to some occult ritual—purposeful, reverent, and with grim anticipation. Whatever weird conjuring is about to take place, del Forno’s determined tone implies that it’s happened before, and there’s no stopping it from happening again.
That mood carries throughout Dinner. There’s not much to "Mum’s Caress After Trip" beyond a ghoul-calliope keyboard line and del Forno’s baleful alto, but it inches under the skin. Del Forno sounds like she’s moved past sorrow into something worse—depressive catatonia—and the music’s ruthless blankness seems to mirror the condition of her spirit. "Useless Treasure" takes this same aesthetic of emptiness and stretches it out to a full seven minutes. Here, del Forno’s voice is lacquered with effects and then stretched and twisted, lurching zombie-like through blue bars of bass. There are echoes of the same funereal mood that pervaded Nico’s Marble Index, but compared to F ingers’ whispery instrumentation and miles of cold empty air, that album seems like an exercise in maximalism. The title track milks a simple, four-chord minor-key guitar line for all it’s worth, dragging it miserably across the song’s six minutes, del Forno’s suffocated vocals so far in the background it sounds like she’s singing from another room, downstairs, beneath a thick wool blanket.
F ingers are even more disquieting when they purposefully ratchet up the darkness. The electronic wind chimes that ripple throughout "Tantrum Time" sound like they’re being stirred up by a warm night breeze outside the devil’s back door, and del Forno’s diced-up and detuned vocals are distinctly menacing; as the song progresses, it slowly fills with more and more digital apparitions—warped bass tones, suffocating static—summoning more horror than dread.
Because its primary goal is sustaining a mood rather than delivering concrete songs, Hide Before Dinner works best when taken as a whole, like outsider art from the afterlife. It’s a bleak and focused exercise in misery—traveling music for a long boat ride down the river Styx.
